It was a sensitive and musical dog.
I understand,′ said Melanie. An ancient, female look passed between them; they were poor women pensioners, planets round a male sun.
Man does and is dressed to do so, his skin is his own business. He is artful, the creation of culture. Woman is; and is, therefore, fully dressed in no clothes at all, her skin is common property.
The notion of a natural propensity for vice is essential to Sadeian psychology; vice is innate, as is virtue, if social conditions are unalterable. This straitjacket psychology relates his fiction directly back to the black and white ethical world of fairy tale and fable; it is in conflict with his frequently expounded general theory of moral relativity, that good and evil are not the same thing at all times and in all places.
Excretion is his first concrete production and, through it, the child gains his first experience of labour relations. He may reserve the right to go on excremental strike or to engage in a form of faecal offensive. The excremental faculty is a manipulative device and to be baulked of the free control of it is to be deprived of the first, most elementary, expression of autonomy.
Watching a film was like being a voyeur, living vicariously.
The air shuddered with the beginning of absence.
One of Sade’s singularities is that he offers an absolutely sexualised view of the world, a sexualisation that permeates everything, much as his atheism does and, since he is not a religious man but a political man, he treats the facts of female sexuality not as a moral dilemma but as a political reality.
So may all your wives, if you need them, be rich and pretty; and all your husbands, if you want them, be young and virile; and all your cats as wily, perspicacious and resourceful as: Puss-in-Boots!
I saw before me a mansion in the Gothic style, all ivied over, and, above the turrets, floated a fingernail moon with a star in its arms.
The dead know something we don’t, although they keep it to themselves.
The world exists only as a medium in which we execute our desires. Physically, the world itself, the actual world – the real world, if you like – is formed of malleable clay; its metaphysical structures is just as malleable.
Most intellectual development depends upon new readings of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the bottles explode.
These days, you could stage a three-point orgy in the garden and nobody would bat an eye...
For Sade, all tenderness is false, a deceit, a trap; all pleasure contains within itself the seeds of atrocities; all beds are minefields.
But there is no mysterious virtue in Justine’s suffering. The martyrdom of this Christ-figure is absolutely useless; she is a gratuitous victim. And if there is no virtue in her suffering, then there is none, it turns out, in her virtue itself; it does nobody any good, least of all herself.
What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!
From beggar to thief is one step, but a step in two directions at the same time, for what a beggar loses in morality when he becomes a thief he regains in self-respect.
And we drove towards the widening dawn, that now streaked half the sky with a wintry bouquet of pink of roses, orange of tiger-lilies, as if my husband had ordered me a sky from a florist. The day broke around me like a cool dream.
The demands of ritual are always stronger than those of reason.